Former development test driver Bob Wallace talks about the Miura, Ferruccio Lamborghini's refusal to go racing, and the best car the factory ever built

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

It's a small, unassuming industrial building, in a block filled with similar buildings out near Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport, and we only know that we have the right place by the street number. A driveway leads to a small paved parking area out back, where, early on this Saturday morning, there's only one vehicle to be found, a blue Nissan pickup truck of indeterminate age. Can this really be where we'll find Bob Wallace, the man who helped bring the world one of the most coveted supercars of all time, the Lamborghini Miura?

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Bob is expecting us, and lets us in through the steel door at the back of the building, where we're greeted with the sight of an alloy-bodied Ferrari 166 F2 car under restoration. This must be the place, then. Thirty-five years ago, Bob moved to this Arizona city, opening a repair and maintenance shop specializing in Ferraris. He's still at it, at 70, though he works on his own these days, by choice. Why Phoenix? "It's a lot cheaper than in Southern California," Bob says in a gravelly voice that's still rich with the accent of his native New Zealand. "In the early years we used to get normal service work from everywhere. And like I said, the dry heat is one thing I do like. I still enjoy working and that's it. I have enough to do; I work by myself by choice now, and just have fun. If you can't enjoy what you're doing, it gets to be some sort of mental slavery or something. I have something interesting to do every day."
Bob has been finding interesting things to do for some time now. As a car-crazy teenager, he hooked on with the racing teams that would visit New Zealand for the winter racing series. He describes his job title as "gofer," but that has the ring of excessive modesty, especially since Maserati thought enough of his talents to offer him a job at the factory in 1959. "Ever since I were a kid I decided I wanted to go to Italy, and they promised me a job and the whole rest of it and so I went," he said. He went with his friend John Ohlson, and neither spoke any Italian. "Yeah, yeah. It's very difficult initially.... The people in that region, the Modenese, are very proud, very industrious and they don't accept strangers very, very easily, and it took a while," he recalled. "They look at you as if to say 'Who the hell are you,' and 'Get lost,' that sort of thing, but it all worked out. The first six months or a year were kind of difficult, but after that, everything was fine." He shrugs it off: "When you're young, you don't worry so much about a lot of things."
In 1963, he went to work for Lamborghini, becoming the company's development test driver ("I did all the road testing and a lot of the road development"); his friend John left Italy, and ended up building the first Daytona Coupes for Carroll Shelby. Bob's first assignment was in developing the 350 GT, the car that launched tractor builder Ferruccio Lamborghini's exotic car business. "The 350 was the best car we ever built, basically," Bob said. "Well, it was extremely light, and extremely fast, for what it was--I think we could run with that thing 252, 254k's [157 miles] an hour. The equivalent Ferrari could run 220, 230 [137-143 mph]. Handled a lot better, and it was a very well thought out car."
Then came the Miura. "I think basically it was the car that made everybody rethink things a little," he said, the pride unmistakable in his carefully chosen words. "I think it was definitely the car that changed everybody's way of thinking about what these cars could be or should be. I think if all of us who designed it and built had had a lot more experience, we probably never would have done it." Why not? "We didn't have enough--the concept and the ideas and everything were there, but we really, really only got that car right at the end of the series.
"The whole problem was, when the car was shown at the Geneva show, it became a commercial success virtually overnight with hundreds of orders for the car," he continued. "And...the fact that Ferruccio Lamborghini himself said the factory wasn't a hobby shop, it had to stand on its own two feet. At that point, the factory had to start producing them." He chuckled about the car's revolutionary transverse mid-engine layout: "The engine, the layout and the rest of it was just an overgrown Mini Minor...you had 12 cylinders instead of four, but the layout and the rest of it was the same. Ferrari back then was basically producing a traditional front engine, live rear axle car...[that was] quite well thought out and very well made, but there was nothing modern about it."
Bob speaks with admiration about Ferruccio Lamborghini's level head for business, and brushes aside any suggestion that the two ever locked horns over the idea of racing. "Lamborghini was very, very intelligent and very smart, and time showed that he was absolutely correct that as a factory, we would never race," he said. Then what about the lightweight Miura that Bob built, the one that's long been assumed was part of an aborted racing program? "I had nothing else to do on a Saturday or a Sunday anyway, and you had a whole factory to play around with, let's build a lighter car. To show it could be done. Have some sort of a mobile test bed for new ideas or trying something different, that sort of thing," he said. No friction? "No, he [Ferruccio] told me, 'You can do whatever the hell you want to do as long as it doesn't interfere with your daily job.' You get up and start testing at 5 in the morning, and drive and play around until 3 in the afternoon, and then go and play around trying to build something. Well, I didn't have anything better to do, and I've always enjoyed cars and still do. But as far as any serious effort to build a race car, no, no, that's something that writers and journalists and people in the past just sort of invented."
There was unofficial and unsanctioned racing, but it took place on the public roads of Italy. For example, Bob and the other test drivers would compete for what they called the world's underground speed record: "I don't know whether you've been over the autostrada through the Apennine Mountains from Bologna to Florence, but there's a whole series of sweeping tunnels through the mountains, and that was it. Now, whoever set the quickest clock time, from one tollgate to the next, he had the record. Back then, they had a stamp-in, stamp-out ticket with the time on it, and so forth and so on. Oh, [it was] a lot of fun." Of course, none of the other drivers knew they were in the middle of a race. "Trucks, Fiat 500s, and ah, you look back on it, and it was actually dangerous and stupid. But that's the way it was. You had the same thing on the autostrada, virtually dead straight, from Milan to Modena. I think it's 152 kilometers. I think Mike Parks was the quickest guy in a Ferrari LM at about 32 or 34 minutes [We did the math--that's an average of 172 mph]. Crazy. Crazy, but fun. Couldn't do it today in the traffic and everything. Hopefully, the country has gotten a little saner since then."
What turned out to be more dangerous, though, was accompanying clients who wanted to take Lamborghini's new cars out for a spin. "[Ferruccio] Lamborghini got on pretty well with everybody, and they'd stop by the factory and Lamborghini would tell me, here, go out with this guy and let him drive. And every race driver has a big ego, and they're going to show the head tester for the factory how quick they can go. Man, some of them would scare the hell out of you," Bob recalled. "I had one clown flip the car, and broke my back and pelvis. I told him afterwards, I dragged you out of the car, buddy, but I should have gone back and thrown a match in the [expletive] thing. Damn near killed me, yeah." And then there was the pal of Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier: "Picks up a brand new car, revs it up, and disappears out the factory gate, and forgets to make the turn. The car just buried itself in a huge irrigation canal on the other side of the road, and that was it. Pretty much a normal thing," he said. "We had a whole bunch of customers with a lot of money and absolutely no brains."
Bob has no longing for a new Lamborghini. "It's a helluva lot better car, mechanically, but it doesn't have any personality, it doesn't have any character. It lost a lot of it, but they had to, because the customer today wants a car that works," he said. "He wants to be comfortable. He wants to have heated seats, and all the rest of the creature comforts. Like this Bugatti supercar, [which is] enormously overweight and doesn't make any sense." He believes the future is "smaller cars, lighter cars, composite materials--fuel efficiency, the whole thing. There will come a time when there are just too many people in the world using up too much petroleum. We're probably 10 years away from that point right now, I think."
By the way, that Datsun pickup out in the lot is his. "I don't need a car, and I've driven enough decent ones that, why go out and buy one? A little Japanese pickup will get me backwards and forwards to work a lot cheaper anyway." And he really doesn't long for an exotic. "No. No, no, no," he says, slowly. "You can't use them anymore anyway. Ah, you can never do, even in Italy, some of the crazy things we used to be able to do. With Stanzani in the passenger seat, I went over the Flüele Pass from Bologna to Florence in the same time as Moss did in the last Mille Miglia. But you've got to bear in mind that the roads are a helluva lot better now, everything is better. But we looked at the clock afterwards, and holy hell...."
Point of View
We asked Bob for his take on some of the cars produced during his tenure:
Espada: "The idea was great, but...there wasn't enough technical collaboration between the body builder and the car manufacturer. But the idea itself was extremely well thought out. You could carry four people comfortably, and go from Milan to Rome damn quick. We had a whole bunch of ideas--we built an active suspension car, and we did a whole bunch of things with it. But there wasn't technology back then, and there also wasn't the money."
Urraco: "The Urraco was a brilliant idea, but a commercial failure. Not the type of car that Lamborghini should ever, ever have thought of building. There wasn't the means. The car was pretty well developed, pretty well thought out, but producing that car in the numbers they originally thought they were going to produce, the tooling costs and the whole rest of it, it was damn near the last straw that broke them. It was a gorgeous, little, very sweet, enormously good handling car. Shoddily built, due to the whole bunch of things, lack of money...just the wrong type of car. Because to have built those in eight or nine cars a day, which was pretty much the minimum amount of production to make money at it, there just wasn't the means."
Jarama: "No, that didn't make sense. No. Too heavy, like most of these cars. Too heavy and too big. Just taking advantage of a shortened-down Espada chassis platform. The bodywork was done by a small supplier; the quality of it was terrible, I'll tell you that. Didn't make sense."
Countach: "[Pablo] Stanzani [Lambor-ghini's chief engineer] and I, we used to take off for a week and go down to the Targa Florio every year, and we actually went down there for a quick weekend trip with the first prototype, and we could see that the car had a lot more potential than the Miura, and just started from there."

This article originally appeared in the September, 2008 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.